DOMINIC RAPSON is passionate about life and he thinks that other people should be too.
He believes that babysitters, construction workers, teachers, security officers, managers and office workers should be too and more importantly that they should all be able to save someone who might experience difficulty breathing or gone into cardiac arrest, is bleeding profusely or is choking.
The co-director of CPR Here and Now told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that while the business is only six weeks old, he has been an emergency first responder and CPR instructor for the last three years, and a scuba instructor for the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) for even longer.
Both he and his business partner Cole Yates said that they have been working on getting more businesses to train and certify their staff in CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, not only because it will soon be mandatory, but because it could literally be the difference between life and death.
Rapson said: “We love working with babysitters, we specialise with them because we think that’s very important and we’re looking at doing a lot of parents as well. We find that the general population of Barbados doesn’t know much about CPR and that’s what I’ve seen as well.”
They are also hopeful about working with the hotels and resorts to train their workers from managers to gardeners.
“We’re also dealing with the hospitality sector because that’s also important. As you know most of [Barbados’] income comes from tourism so we need to look after our tourists,” said Rapson.
Yates added: “. . . . People might not see that this might better for the tourism product but if something does happen and a staff member is trained to deal with a guest who is experiencing a near-death experience, that’s going to look a lot better. We’ve found that a lot more places than you would think don’t have enough or any staff . . . who are trained”.
Rapson noted that the instructor lead course they offered could be as short as three hours or it could be longer depending on the number of people who participated and how receptive they were to the lesson. No more than 12 people are engaged at a time and each participant has to write an exam in order to qualify for the certification, they emphasised.
“We do all the hands-on training so [participants] get the hands-on experience before something actually happens,” they added.
“We teach all different types of techniques. Do you walk around with rubber gloves and stuff like that in your hand or your bag? No. We try to teach, especially when it comes to broken bones and seriously bleeding how to deal with the situation with the least amount of resources. You’ve got to be resourceful and start thinking. How to use the shirt off your back although we still do teach about the barrier use, it’s mandatory, so we teach how to use the gloves, pocket masks, and using just your fingers to separate your lips from the person’s.
“That’s why I’m happy to be using emergency first response which is the agency which we certified through and they include all of this. I believe it is mandatory, you shouldn’t be able to say as an option, you have to show people everything because every situation is different,” said Rapson.
He shared that although he has never had “anyone die on me”, most of his experience comes from rescuing people while diving.
“. . . . Talking about general CPR, I’ve had occasions where I’ve walked past fetes and they’ll be young kids who’ve probably had their first encounter with alcohol and they’re absolutely out of it and their friends are standing over them laughing, while the kid is choking. I’ve had to go over and alleviate that [using the recovery position]. Something so simple the other kids didn’t know could save their friend’s life,” he said. (Green Bananas Media)